Visual Art of Chris Lockhart

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oil on canvas

In the Spring of 2012, I was finishing up Painting IV at Brevard College and I wanted to do a piece that somehow honored the landscape of south-eastern Ohio, where I had grown up. I found inspiration in the paintings of Yangyang Pan, particularly her abstract landscapes from 2010. I really appreciate her open compositions and the rhythmic application of paint. For a further challenge, I decided to work with a triadic color scheme of secondary colors, that is: purple, orange, and green.

With Ways to Dissolve, I continued my exploration of the red pigments. After painting the atmospheric Turning Red, I wanted to use the same red pigments in a more solid structured way. I also wanted to get into it with gutsy brush-strokes as opposed to the smooth wispy paint in Turning Red. At the time, I was looking a lot at Willem de Kooning’s Clam Diggers and Jasper Johns’s Target and Numbers and I can see where their influence fed into this painting.

In Painting III, we were tasked with creating a painting inspired by the Greek myth of Icarus. In addition to the fall of Icarus as a consequence of his pride and arrogance, I also wanted to approach the idea that Icarus was really very small in greater scheme of things. Not only was he small, but so was his plight.

A painting based very directly on The Third of May by Francisco Goya. I wanted to push it further from the original than I did, but was still hesitant to do so. So, I ended up hovering somewhere between my intention and just copying. Eventually, I’ll pul this out and push it more.